Moodog: Tracking Students' Online Learning Activities 

H. Zhang, K. Almeroth, A. Knight, M. Bulger, R. Mayer
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110

Many universities are currently using a Course Management System 
(CMS) to organize course materials and conduct online learning 
activities. However, most commercial or open source CMS software 
does not include comprehensive access tracking and log analysis 
capabilities. In this paper, we propose and implement a CMS log 
analysis tool, called Moodog, to track students' online learning 
activities. The goals of Moodog are twofold: first, to provide 
instructors with insight about how students interact with online 
course materials, and second, to allow students to easily compare 
their own progress to others in the class. With the activity 
information available, Moodog also provides automatic email 
reminders to students encouraging or instructing them to view 
available materials that they have not yet accessed. Using Moodog, 
we have conducted a preliminary case study on a course held in 
Spring 2006 at the University of California, Santa Barbara to 
reveal activity patterns that occurred in this course.